In the 1970s, the US began loosening restrictions on prison labor while simultaneously starting to attribute homelessness to mental illness and addiction (and ignoring economic factors). Forty-plus years later and those two parallel tracks of neoliberalism are merging and resurrecting the 19th century Victorian workhouse.
With the number of homeless continuing to rise in the US, municipalities, states, and the national government are faced with the task of doing something about a problem that’s apparently just too hard to solve. As with most any response to the fallout from neoliberalism here in the land of the free, the US comes equipped with a hammer in search of a nail that will profit the powerful and well-connected. And so it is with the “homeless problem” as we see the outlines of consensus beginning to form around solutions that involve incarceration — and therefore forced labor.
Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” drew inspiration from England’s Poor Law Act of 1834, which established the workhouse system that rather than provide refuge for the elderly, sick and poor or food and shelter in exchange for work in times of high unemployment, established a labor prison system.
And so it goes in America 190 years later.
US prisons that for decades have used forced labor will increasingly include the homeless among their ranks as the US Supreme Court-sanctioned criminalization of homelessness gathers momentum, and states like California return to “tough on crime” policies with the stated goal of ridding the streets of the unhoused.
The criminalization of homelessness is an easy solution that means the fact we have turned a basic human necessity over to market forces goes unchallenged. That means doing nothing about:
- Poverty wages (between 40-60 percent of the homeless are employed).
- Housing cartels jacking up rent.
- Homebuilder cartels constraining supply.
- Private equity buying up single-family and multi-family housing, which means a lack of affordable housing.
- Central bank monetary policies that make the rich richer while mostly hurting everyone else.
- A healthcare system that frequently bankrupts people.
- A lack of a social safety net.
By deflecting attention away from these issues while simultaneously expanding the reach of the carceral state — which weakens “free” labor — the criminalization of homelessness is a win-win for American plutocrats.
No Effort to Stop the Causes of Homelessness
Trump is the latest to come along with a plan that does nothing to address the underlying causes.
“For a small fraction of what we spend upon Ukraine, we could take care of every homeless veteran in America,” he says in a 2023 video. He’s partially right. The US could take care of every homeless individual for a fraction of the money that’s been spent on the Ukraine racket. Here’s more:
…[Trump] will open large parcels of inexpensive land, bring in doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug rehab specialists, and create tent cities where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified.
In addition, President Trump will bring back mental institutions to house and rehabilitate those who are severely mentally ill or dangerously deranged with the goal of reintegrating them back into society.
We’ll see if he follows through. Plans to deal with the homelessness crisis are often unveiled and quickly forgotten, and Trump has a short attention span. Nevertheless, it’s hard to argue this is worse than the whole lot of nothing currently being done; it’s also easy to see it going horribly wrong (e.g., an understaffed site that’s inexpensive because it’s on toxic land which quickly devolves into chaos and mass arrests).
Also, “relocated” to where? Trump is light on details, but If there’s no public housing and no affordable housing, where are people to go?
“Problems identified.” What if the problem is lack of money as many of the homeless are working.
Rather than answer these basic questions, he swings for the deportation pinata. Trump also says any failure to comply will result in imprisonment, which is now a bipartisan solution.
The Criminalization of Homelessness
Let’s take a look at California. That great bastion of liberalism contains one-third of the nation’s 650,000-plus homeless, and its champion, Gov. Gavin Newsom, is largely in agreement with Trump. He signed an executive order in July calling for cities to “humanely remove encampments from public spaces.” The order of course does nothing to address the systemic problems behind homelessness, including a lack of affordable housing and Social Security benefits not coming close to covering rent leading to skyrocketing numbers of homeless senior citizens. How “humane” can Newsom’s policy be?
As Deyanira Nevárez Martínez, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University writes, Newsom’s approach effectively turns the issue over to the criminal justice system and “leads to forced displacement that makes people without housing more likely to be arrested and experience increased instability and trauma.”
And it won’t just be displacement. California localities, like so many across the country, are increasingly passing laws that make it a crime to be unhoused.
The Supreme Court ruled this year in Grants Pass v. Johnson that cities can penalize individuals for sleeping in public spaces even when no shelter is available. That decision overturned the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling that anti-camping ordinances violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
California voters are once again getting “tough on crime.”
On election day California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36, which increases penalties for theft and drug possession, including reclassifying some misdemeanors as felonies. The measure was sold as a way to put an end to homelessness and included pro-business PACs and the powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Association as its major backers. Property crimes did indeed increase during the initial years of the pandemic, but have since begun to decline again across California, which continues a decades-long trend, according to the Department of Justice. Nonetheless, California police, prosecutors, and Silicon Valley “bros” have for years pushed the asinine argument that the state’s supposedly soft-on-crime approach is the cause behind the increase in homelessness.
When homelessness is framed as a choice that takes advantage of too-lenient laws, the solution is easy: lock them up. And that’s what California’s new laws will do. From Cal Matters:
The Legislative Analyst’s Office forecasts that the measure will cost tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Those costs are chiefly from placing a few thousand more people in prison and putting them in for longer terms.
A few notes on drug addiction and untreated mental health issues, which are often blamed for the modern day Hoovervilles across the country.
A study from UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative last year was one of the deepest dives into California’s crisis in decades. It found that drug use and mental health problems are not the driver behind people losing housing; the primary reason is the increasing precariousness of the working poor.
Even if you believe that the issue can be boiled down to mental health and drugs, that is even more of a reason to attack the underlying economic culprits behind homelessness and poverty in the US. That’s because mental health and/or addiction problems can result from the loss of housing and it can severely worsen existing issues.
The UCSF study found that many succumb to drugs as a way to numb the pain of being chewed up and discarded by American society. It is also well-established that poverty and homelessness can lead to or worsen physical and mental health. For example, studies have shown PTSD is common after losing one’s home. It goes beyond just homelessness. For example, a recent study published in the Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing finds that food insecurity is linked to severe mental illness. About 1 in 5 children in the US face food insecurity, as do 44 million Americans overall.
Back to California. While Proposition 36 also creates a new category of crime — a “treatment-mandated felony” — which allows for the completion of drug treatment instead of going to prison, the accused still face up to three years behind bars if they don’t finish treatment, and there are major questions about funding. Newsom says the measure is likely to “impact some existing drug treatment and mental health services.” It will also shift more of those services under the umbrella of the criminal justice system, which frequently makes the problem worse as we’ve seen from the decades-long “war on drugs.” As the Prison Policy Initiative explains:
Jails and prisons are often described as de facto mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, and corrections officials increasingly frame their missions around offering healthcare. But the reality is quite the opposite: people with serious health needs are warehoused with severely inadequate healthcare and limited treatment options. Instead, jails and prisons rely heavily on punishment, while the most effective and evidence-based forms of healthcare are often the least available.
This unsurprisingly results in an endless cycle of arrest for people who use drugs and for those who are homeless. The UCSF study found that roughly 20 percent of the state’s unhoused population entered homelessness from an institutional setting, such as jail and prison stays. And criminalization only makes the problem worse. From Governing:
The collateral consequences of even short-term jailing — such as loss of employment, separation from families, and fines and fees — increase the likelihood of future arrest while exposing arrested individuals to health risks and unsanitary conditions associated with jails.
Again, this measure and other California efforts blame drug use and crime for homelessness and do nothing to address the primary causes, i.e., unchecked American capitalism.
Time and again those experienced in the field say the most effective method to combat the crisis is to stop people from becoming homeless in the first place. California is not only ignoring that plea, but is making the problem even worse.
Slave Labor and American Productivity
What else did citizens on the “Left Coast” vote for? They rejected a rent control ballot measure that would have given cities more freedom to limit how much landlords can raise rent. Opponents of the measure included landlords, realtors, and Newsom who argued that rent control would reduce incentives to build new housing. He didn’t comment on any incentives to not build more housing.
Voters also rejected a prison reform measure that would have ended forced labor in prisons and jails. From Cal Matters:
California mandates tens of thousands of incarcerated people to work at jobs – many of which they do not choose — ranging from packaging nuts to doing dishes, to making license plates, sanitizer and furniture for less than 74 cents an hour, according to legislative summaries of prison work.
This is common practice across the country where imprisoned laborers have no minimum wage, no overtime, no unemployment, no workers’ compensation, no social security, no occupational health and safety protections, and no right to form unions and collectively bargain.
For decades the US has been moving towards removing restrictions on prisoner work and expanding the system — even if it puts forced labor in competition with “free” labor.
Back in 1929 the Supreme Court upheld a law that restricted the interstate sales of prisoner-produced goods, explaining that “free labor, properly compensated, cannot compete successfully with the enforced and unpaid or underpaid convict labor of the prison.”
That began to change in the 1970s, however, as neoliberalism took hold, Congress started to ease restrictions on private companies using prison labor. They were allowed to use it, but required to pay prevailing wages, most of which can be diverted to fund prisoners own imprisonment or otherwise stolen.
Similar neoliberal trends were happening on the homelessness front:
In my upcoming book, I show that, beginning in the 1980s, attributing homelessness to mental illness and addiction was politically engineered to obscure the socioeconomic roots of the crisis and to justify the removal of homeless people from public space.https://t.co/K8FH27HUET pic.twitter.com/nLJoExurH6
— Brian Goldstone (@brian_goldstone) December 11, 2024
Here’s Erin Hatton, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo with some numbers showing where the situation is today:
In the United States today, more than 2 million people are incarcerated in prisons and jails, another 4.5 million people are under supervision via probation or parole, and 70 million people have some type of criminal record. The carceral state has thus exerted its grip on nearly half of the U.S. workforce. In fact, the combined prison and jail population of the United States roughly equals the number of employees that Walmart, the world’s largest employer, employs across the globe.
Hatton breaks the types of jobs in US prisons and their effects on “free” labor:
The first category is facility maintenance, also known as “regular” or “non-industry” jobs. In these roles, incarcerated people work to keep the prison running; they sustain its operations. The vast majority of incarcerated workers perform this type of labor…Because wages for this work are invariably minimal—ranging from no pay at all in many southern states to $2 per hour in Minnesota and New Jersey—this form of labor saves prison operators untold sums of money by supplanting free-world, full-wage workers.
The second category is “industry” jobs, which are positions in the government-run prison factories that were launched in the 1930s. These account for just under five percent of state and federal prisoner employment. People who labor in these factories produce a wide range of goods and services for sale to government agencies: office furniture and filing cabinets; road signs and license plates; uniforms, linens, and mattresses for prisons and hospitals; wooden benches and metal grills for public parks; even body armor for military and police. In Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas state prisons, incarcerated workers receive no wages for this labor. On average, state and federal prisoners earn $0.33–$1.41 per hour for this work (as compared to an average of $0.14–$0.63 per hour for the facility maintenance jobs described above).
The third category of incarcerated labor is for private-sector companies that set up shop inside U.S. prisons. Such jobs employ just 0.3 percent of the U.S. prison population. These are the highest paid prison jobs, because private-sector companies are legally obligated to pay “prevailing wages” in order to avoid undercutting non-prison labor. However, incarcerated workers do not actually receive these “prevailing wages.” Private employers often pay only the minimum wage, not the prevailing wage, and legal loopholes allow them to pay even less. Moreover, incarcerated workers’ wages are subject to many deductions and fees, which are capped at a whopping 80 percent of gross earnings. In other words, U.S. prisons seize most of the workers’ wages in these jobs. Further, some states have mandatory savings programs that take away an additional portion of the pay. Thus, even though regulations mandate free-world compensation for private-sector jobs in prison, prison rates prevail.
The final category is work that occurs outside of the prison, through various labor arrangements such as work-release programs, outside work crews, and work camps. While no concrete data are available, reports suggest that such jobs are more common than both public and private industry jobs, though not as common as facility maintenance jobs. This category is highly heterogeneous, including work for public works, nonprofit agencies, and private companies. In work-release programs, prisoners typically maintain free-world jobs—at free-world wages, though subject to prison-world deductions—and then return to the prison after work hours. In prison work crews, incarcerated workers leave the prison or jail facility during work hours to perform public works, or “community service” jobs, such as fighting fires and cleaning highways, park grounds, and abandoned lots. Such workers typically return to prison at the end of the workday, unless their labor—as in the case of wildfires—is far from the prison; in those cases, they are typically housed in prison-like facilities, such as fire camps. In one instance, incarcerated women who labored for a multi-million dollar egg farm in Arizona were relocated to company housing so that the farm could retain its low-wage and reportedly “more compliant” incarcerated labor force despite the COVID-19 lockdowns that would halt the prison’s work-release program.
Prison labor is a nice little gift for American corporations. According to a 2022 report from the ACLU, “labor tied specifically to goods and services produced through state prison industries brought in more than $2 billion in 2021.”
Details are less readily available about American jails and other forms of “supervision” and their benefits for capital. The ACLU report did not account for work-release and other programs run through local jails, detention and immigration centers and even drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities. But we can gather some anecdotal data. According to the AP:
Some people arrested in Alabama are put to work even before they’ve been convicted. An unusual work-release program accepts pre-trial defendants, allowing them to avoid jail while earning bond money. But with multiple fees deducted from their salaries, that can take time.
And in Louisiana:
Jack Strain, a former longtime sheriff in the state’s St. Tammany Parish, pleaded guilty in 2021 in a scheme involving the privatization of a work-release program in which nearly $1.4 million was taken in and steered to Strain, close associates and family members. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison, which came on top of four consecutive life sentences for a broader sex scandal linked to that same program.
The Capitalist Dream of Incarcerated Laborers
Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner’s comments last year calling for a 40-50 percent rise in unemployment and “pain” in the economy to remind laborers that “they work for the employer, not the other way around” were refreshing for their honesty.
Gurner Group founder Tim Gurner tells the Financial Review Property Summit workers have become “arrogant” since COVID and “We’ve got to kill that attitude.” https://t.co/lcX3CCxGuj pic.twitter.com/f9HK2YZRRE
— Financial Review (@FinancialReview) September 12, 2023
Gurner might be an Australian “apartment wunderkind,” but such beliefs aren’t confined to the Lucky Country. Indeed, such forms of coercion are precisely what capital likes about imprisoned workers. From Hatton’s Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment:
….the defining feature across all these forms of prison labor is the infliction of punishment, or the threat of punishment, to secure compliance. When incarcerated workers do not obey a command from the corrections officers who oversee their labor, they can be fined a week’s wages, put on “keeplock” (confined to one’s own cell), and put in solitary confinement. Because of these punishments, moreover, incarcerated people can lose opportunities for parole. The risks of noncompliance for incarcerated workers thus include losing crucial connections with friends and family, losing access to essential food, amenities, recreation, and freedom of movement (however constrained), and, for some, losing the possibility of future freedom.
The following is from the Urban Institute in 2003, but as Gurner’s comments demonstrate, there’s little reason to suspect such opinions have changed:
Employers strongly spoke of the quality of the inmate workforce in responses to the question of what they liked best about employing inmates. Responses of workforce “quality and productivity” far outweighed “lower costs” 53% to 7%. Additionally, employers rated inmates as somewhat more productive than a domestic workforce might be, and 92% said they “recommend” the inmate workforce to business associates. As one employer explains: “Inmates learn that the success of our company depends on the satisfaction of our customers with our product. Quality, service and price have to meet expectations. Our futures are intertwined…”
This data provides supporting evidence that in today’s environment, employers consider inmate workers to be productive workers—“more productive” than the domestic workforce— in a variety of manufacturing, assembly and services production settings.
Yes it would make sense they’re more productive. Less distractions.
Perhaps the ever-expanding US carceral plays an underappreciated role in America’s “productivity boom”:
Just how much does the US rely on prison labor?
The American economy pic.twitter.com/CHHOHDBFq7
— inhumans of capitalism (Ojibwa )🔻 (@Inhumansoflate1) October 27, 2024
He might be slightly overstating the case out of self interest but not by much. Imprisoned Arizonans, like most people on the outside, are forced to sell their labor for at least 40 hours a week. Many of the ones in official captivity earn just 10 cents an hour for their work, however.
Arizona, like many states, contracts with The GEO Group, one of the largest private prison companies. If that name sounds familiar, that’s because it was in the news recently due to its stock soaring following Trump’s victory and his promise to crack down on crime and illegal immigration.
The details of the contracts a state like Arizona signs with The GEO Group are telling. At Florence West prison, for example, Arizona guarantees GEO a 90% occupancy rate. The state must pay a per diem rate for 675 prisoners, regardless of how many people are actually incarcerated there, although the state is incentivized to make sure it’s at or near capacity. That’s because, as Arizona Department of Corrections Director David Shinn explains, prisoners are forced to provide labor “to city, county, local jurisdictions, that simply can’t be quantified at a rate that most jurisdictions could ever afford. If you were to remove these folks from that equation, things would collapse in many of your counties, for your constituents.”
So what amounts to slave labor helps keep taxes low on one end. And then there’s the profit motive on the other, as explained by Arizona Rep. John Kavanagh:
“You have to guarantee that they’re going to have people there, and they’re going to have a profit that they make, they’re going to have income,” Kavanagh said. “No one’s going to enter into a contract when you can’t guarantee the income that they expect. That’s kind of based on basic business.”
“Basic business” also includes the widespread availability of low-wage and easily exploitable immigrants for American capital, which brings us back to Team Trump and The GEO Group.
Will Trump deal with illegal immigration by making it difficult for these migrants to get paid work or will he provide more of an “innovative” testing ground for Israeli-style surveillance and detention tech while continuing to ensure the supply of cheap labor? It increasingly looks like the latter.
According to incoming vice president JD Vance, the Trump administration is going to ensure its immigration and deportation plans are not bad for business. “Generally I agree, okay, we’re going to let some immigrants in,” he says. “We want them to be high-talent, high quality people. You don’t want to let a large number of illegal aliens in.”
The Trump plan is starting to sound like policy as usual, which highlights the connection between the police state, immigration detention, deportation, and labor. From Noah Zatz, a law professor at UCLA:
This continuity is particularly important because labor advocates and the labor movement have come to understand—through a long and still-contested process—how employers gain power to intimidate, retaliate against, and divide workers when the state’s deportation threat hangs over them and can be invoked by employers.
Better Solutions to Homelessness
The US is actually finding success cutting the number of homeless veterans. The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announced in November that veteran homelessness rates dropped to a record low since detailed counting began in 2009. Officials counted 32,882 homeless veterans, down significantly from recent years and a 55.6 percent decrease from 2010.
While the overall number is still soberingly high, and the program is imperfect since it doesn’t address underlying economic causes that will continue to see vets cast onto the streets, it is progress. How did they do it?
Using a Housing First approach, which prioritizes getting a homeless individual into housing and then assists with access to health care and other support. Notably, the VA program does not try to determine who is “housing ready” or demand mental health or addiction treatment prior to housing. The Housing First model says that housing is a fundamental right and that housing programs should identify and address the needs of the people it serves from the people’s perspective. The VA is doing that by providing immediate access to permanent, subsidized, independent housing without treatment participation or sobriety prerequisites.
For this fiscal year—Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025—the VA budget for Veteran homelessness programs is $3.2 billion. That’s less than what the US has been spending per month on Ukraine since Feb. 2022.
So why not scale up the VA program and apply to all homeless Americans, as well as help those in danger of becoming homeless. According to Fran Quigley who directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law, there are nine million U.S. households that are behind on their rent right now. There’s an easy way to help them: give them money.
If we consider capital’s incentives to discipline and control workers — including throwing the homeless into modern day workhouses — there is a strong argument to be made for fledgling American organized labor to more actively join the fight against both homelessness and mass imprisonment. As Zatz from the UCLA School of Law argues:
One intuitive answer focuses on characterizing incarcerated people as workers and the carceral state as a system of labor exploitation. This approach asserts a shared identity and a shared foe. The easiest way to make the argument highlights how employers may substitute hyper-vulnerable incarcerated workers for rights-bearing “free labor.” But the strategy has been known to backfire: Rather than engendering solidarity, it can instead amplify hostility by portraying incarcerated people as a threat to non-incarcerated people’s jobs.
A different path to solidarity highlights how the carceral state reaches into the heart of so-called “free” labor markets. What I call a “carceral labor continuum” stretches from the prison, through “work-release” programs, to parole work requirements, to “working off” criminal fines and fees, and more. As a result, carceral labor is not a problem confined to the prison, and it provides no neat divide between any “us” and “them.”
Or as the Hampton Institute puts it:
labor-based consumer income. There will be many contradictions that come with keeping capitalism alive for the sole purpose of feeding the soon-to-be trillionaire class. Of course, this is all contingent on the outcome of class struggle.
— Hampton Institute (@HamptonThink) September 20, 2024
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This is an excellent article well thought out and written. Somewhere in the mid-nineties I was in charge of helping some professors from Bulgaria get around in Washington, DC. As we had lunch one day and I was asking them what they thought of our country they said they were deeply shocked by the number of homeless people on the street. They said such a thing was impossible in their country not because the State was responsible but because people in Bulgaria would not tolerate it and would simply take someone in or see to it through social pressure that someone in the family would take those people in and take care of him. I’ve travelled a bit in my life and seen that people take care of each other when there are viable communities. Family and clan take care of people particularly in poor countries.
Our problem is not so much homelessness and the economic consequences of a winner-take-all economy but rather the cultural reality of life in the USA. We are very poor and lacking in real community. We have moved from a formerly compassionate (outside gov’t) society to one that valorizes selfishness, competition, and generally excludes compassion except, ironically, for pets. I know people who care far move about dogs than people. I have no faith whatever that government can eve begin to address social issues without mucking it all up because bureaucrats and “helpers” really don’t care for the most part. These people do care, in the abstract, because they start out compassionate but the System makes them cynical and the conditions and regulations in many places that are supposed to “help” people are just another form of bureaucracy and personal relations with clients or inmates tends to be discouraged in a country that values selfishness and fantasy rather than community values.
Government is not a solution to any of our collective or personal problems. At times, when compassionate people intervene, it can work but the politicians that make the rules are seldom compassionate nor are the “reporters” who cover these issues. They are all focused on their own careers and making their house payments and ability to raise and educate their children. If they can earn a few thousand more a year, they’ll uproot their families and move to a new location with a lot of neighbors who don’t give a sh*t about them or anyone else. It all has to start with building communities and taking care of business through mutual aid and a set of moral values that starts with compassion and connection with others–a singular feature of right-brain dominant people. Our culture prefers values relative to left-brain values–selfishness, security, and routine.
“Government is not a solution to any of our collective or personal problems”
unless the government is making the problems (on behalf of the donor class) – its not as if the atomization of US culture and society self-developed in a vacuum. See offshoring of US industries to Asia to kill labor (aka community’s) ability to demand a reasonable share of the GDP, a chamber of commerce supported government initiative through tax laws, subsidies, etc.
Chris Cosmos:
I agree with your sentiment that:
“It all has to start with building communities and taking care of business through mutual aid and a set of moral values…”
The importance of culture (commuting a sense of ideals) is rarely taken seriously–and, in fact, such a concern today is often dismissed as a diversion from the real issue of successfully being able to provide material benefits.
It has always been fascinating to me that the communist movement could be viewed culturally as quite conservative. In its Leninist form, the Party took up functions once performed by the Church–it sought to function as a normative institution unlike more traditional Western political parties. In fact, Louis Fischer, an old-time Marxist, used to argue the importance of analyzing communist movements as primarily cultural!
I don’t even know what that means, but it sounds real good.
We are humans, and this is how we roll. Why expect better outcomes?
“What you mean ’we’, paleface?”
Not sure I agree with the “government can’t fix things” argument–I’m not sure I’ve seen in my adult decades what a strong American government can do because so many decades of conservative “Starve the Beast” policies have precluded that possibility–but can confirm that in my small farming town (60,000 people) in rural China, where the unemployment rates for young men are especially high, you still see no homelessness. Families do deal with it. Even in Beijing and Suzhou, where I lived for the prior five years, homelessness doesn’t exist.
You shouldn’t be comfortable with the old libertarian canard about government not being able to take care of the citizenry (often referred to as the government not being able to “fix” what’s broken). The OP offers up the usual BS about volunteers and “community” taking in homeless people, when libertarian and neoliberal policies caused the homelessness and so much other dysfunction in the first place. Yes, it most certainly is caused by “winner-take-all” economic policies. Civilized countries can take for granted vital government-provided services like Universal health care, but here? In the world headquarters of Finance Capital. No. That the US citizenry doesn’t have Med4All is a moral crime of the first rank.
It’s naive and foolish to think that a few brave (and well-off, no?) citizens can solve the problem of the un-housed by taking in strangers and caring for them.
I have a brother who is now ensconced in a hospital, who was homeless. There’s no way I or any family members could take care of him. A big bad government program, Social Security, pays for his room and board. That is as it should be. Once again, members of the political class, along with their bosses on Wall Street, are howling for the destruction of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, repeating the same lies that have been drummed into the heads of every citizen. I’ll take down the numbers of any citizen volunteers who will be willing to house and feed me when my SS is taken from me.
A neoliberal populace is ungovernable because it is composed of atomized individuals among whom there is no community, and therefore among whom there can be no “public purpose” because there is no “public” to serve. This suits the oligarchs who need the serfs never to recognize the commonality of their individual plights.
This is the “freedom” of Hayek and his fellow travellers — the freedom of the powerful to exploit the weak.
Excellent comment to an outstanding post by Conor! “Meet the new boss…..same as the old boss”. After several recent years of homelessness, I see no decrease in the size of the “incarceration Nation”. Au contraire! With governor Gavin “French Laundry” Newsom now supporting legislation to criminalize homelessness i don’t see him continuing to support any “housing first” initiatives. I foresee “FEMA camps”…… :^(
Well, yes, but the population isn’t neoliberal; the government is. Neoliberals run the government, for the most part. Imagine the spiritual and moral uplift that would occur if we finally got Med4All, for instance. The populace overwhelmingly favor this, but we ain’t gonna get it short of a revolution.
Are they really thinking about bringing back Workhouses? When the British first set them up, they were suppose to be as harsh as possible so that you only went there if you had no other possible choice. Documents that the time actually stated this. It was a humiliating experience and even in the 20th century people did not forget the stigma of it. Men were put to work breaking stones for road base or the like while women were put to work unpicking tar-soaked ropes. You could work your whole life but at the end if you did not have family to support you, you went to the Workhouse. Same if you were sick or a woman giving birth who could not afford a doctor. There is a very good website about the Workhouses in the UK and here is a link that starts with the entry process-
https://www.workhouses.org.uk/life/entry.shtml
More links about Workhouse life in links to the left.
Oh, look over there, the poor Uighurs in Chinese forced labour camps…
Why do you pick the mote out of the Chinese’ eye and ignore the beam in your own (US)?
Or it could be that the disease of Neoliberalism and American Libertarianism has infected the world? In any case, the profit motive is the incentive for slavery and war. Always has been.
You didn’t pick the small mote of sarcasm in my words?
Sarcasm detection may be a bit hard in plain typed text with no clues like intonation. One method, “so over the top that it cannot be serious” fails miserably. Using phrases and terms that “serious-over-the-toppers” would avoid, like “Oh, look over there” is too subtle to many. Perhaps tags would help, e.g.
You didn’t pick the small mote of sarcasm in my words?
Of course, a gentle explanation may be sufficient in this forum.
I thought slavery is unconstitutional.
“except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted…” Ha, ha GOTCHA!
Why you think, Thaddeus Stevens rushed home so fast to Lydia, in Lincoln?
(Probably, and de facto) no.
The 13th Amendment says: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Now, it’s arguable whether the punishment referred to is JUST the sentence of incarceration, but you would have no trouble finding judges who would say that enforced labor while incarcerated is part of the whole deal. In fact, I am 100% sure there is lots of case law stating that it’s OK.
“Orange-Collar Labor: Work and Inequality in Prison” by Gibson-Light is nearing the top of my reading list. I have no doubt the issue will be covered there.
There are a lot of references to Michele Goodwin, “The Thirteenth Amendment: Modern Slavery, Capitalism, and Mass Incarceration,” Cornell Law Review 104 (2018): 899–990 in the notes, plus a few references in the index to sections referring to the issue
the 13th amendment allows for incarcerated people to be used as slaves. California had the prop to revoke this part of the amendment, thus freeing the incarcerated from compulsory labor. The 13th is most famous for freeing the slaves, but it enslaves others as well. This is a feature not a bug.
yes Prop 6 we had high hopes for it, lost approx 53% to 47%. by county it won in LA, Alameda (Oakland) SF and quite a few others. got crushed in the Klan counties in the north.
IIRC, it is the rural areas where most of the prisons are located, which the locals are dependent on for both paid jobs such as the prison guards and the local governments for their tax base. The state prison guards’ union is also extremely powerful.
Here’s the theme song for the article (which is quite good I may say) California Uber Alles. Listen to the words. Not much music like this is allowed to become popular in these times.
I’m thinking something like the WPA was the solution back in 30’s but, won’t work today as there is no profit to be gained.
Obama should have enacted a WPA-like program when he entered office. Instead, unemployment benefits were extended and many people went on disability. Drug problems increased. And the economy has not fully recovered since then.
As I said above, any government solution won’t work because the government is systemically corrupt and no “reform” is possible in the short term and probably the medium term since I see not trend favoring that reform. Long-term we may be able to collectively do something but ONLY if culture changes away from the narcissism that is at the center of our society.
Wrong. Social Security works pretty well, actually. It can be improved, certainly. You’re making excuses. The culture is “narcissistic” because of the way “we” organize our economic affairs. You’re offering up typical libertarian nonsense to avoid dealing with the awful truth, that the utterly destructive forces of Capitalism in general, and Finance Capitalism in particular, are at the hart of our degraded culture and political society.
Thanks for this, although it doesn’t inspire much hope for a better tomorrow
I don’t see either political party willing to make the changes necessary to create a more equitable economic system in the U.S. And, there are questions as to what actually would work to make the system fairer. To me, it would reqire huge changes. I don’t see that happening unless there was a major collapse – worse than the 2007 crisis.
The criminal justice system is the best way to handle the homeless problem. Individual needs can be determined once people are in the system. So, I basically agree with Trump’s plan – if he’s serious about it. And, the tents would be built on the outskirts of cities.
California likely has so many homeless people because it’s traditionally liberal and because its weather is moderate. Many California homeless are from other parts of the country, or not even from the U.S. I don’t know the percentages, but evidence suggests this. I live in a large California city and it’s an epidemic here. Along with the trash problem homelessness creates. Drug stores in the downtown area have to lock up merchandise. I was told by a drug store worker that they would not have any merchandise to sell if they did not lock it up. It’s crazy to have our cities degraded like this.
“The criminal justice system is the best way to handle the homeless problem. Individual needs can be determined once people are in the system.”
All to often, the system is criminal with a patina of justice. Once an “individual need” like suicidal tendency or serious mental problem, the solution is solitary confinement and monumental neglect, occasionally leading to stories like a prisoner found DESICCATED and, before death noticed with considerable delay, utterly famished, while prison guards cheerfully marked that he is OK every 15 minutes until his death was spotted. Then we have prison food FORMULATED to taste bad, and under punishment, intensely revolting food can be served “satisfying all nutritional requirements”. From top to bottom, “the system” is cruel beyond any rational justification. Think about it: why set wages below 1 USD/h (or barely above)? So work could be forced with nutriloaf etc., cruel people want to increase the need for punishments.
It used to be that people were sort of flattened on cars when arrested, now it is standard (or at least frequent) to flatten them on the ground, often with dangerous “slamming”. Recently, because of this practice, a person arrested in Phoenix suffered burns that left huge scars and require a month of hospitalization, as it happened on a sunny afternoon when the temperature was 114 F in shade (and sunlit pavement was surely much hotter). And why non-resisting people are handcuffed in the back, not to mention frequent cuffing hands to hospital beds.
Agree U.S. criminal justice system is overly focused on punishment or retribution rather than rehabilitation. And one can question whether one of the other goals – deterrence – is achieved when there are such high rates of recidivism. I think some European countries should be modeled. Norway comes to mind. But, Norway is a pretty homogeneous society. The U.S. is not.
I’m not advocating long-term incarceration for drug addicted individuals. I support more investment in group sober living, like halfway houses. The choice should be offered of “treatment or jail.”
People need to be weaned off whatever substances they are on to determine what the problem actually is.
However, I do not oppose requiring people in prisons to do some kind of work. I think work is therapeutic. I’m not talking about harsh physical labor, but I don’t see how you could not view the backbreaking work of farm labor as harsh. And those people actually come to the country illegally in order to perform that work.
actually the people performing backbreaking work do not come here “illegally”. You did, however. If our presence discomfits you perhaps a return to your fatherland is in order.
TycheSD- “California likely has so many homeless people because it’s traditionally liberal”
Don’t consume to much of those sugary drinks like Kool-Aid
Biden pardons a Judge for taking bribes to put kids into prison. For profit prison and the whole plantation crime industry is at base. Got to keep the profit gears turning – more private prisons equals more profitable incarceration – got to keep up the growth
Author argues American capitalism is the culprit. Ok, so capitalism for the poor? But certainly not for the wealthy? Wealthy have been operating under a system completely devoid of any form of market based reality for some time.
Exactly!
Scrooge will be pleased, and the news comes just in time for Christmas Present with promise for Christmas Future!
We are a society of virtual Scrooges except we pretend to care but don’t–that is one of the hallmarks of this age, i.e., hypocrisy on an industrial scale.
How did we go from 30 years ago in LA, Harry Shearer would start his program with, ‘live from Santa Monica-home of the homeless’ as that’s about the only place aside from skid row in downtown LA, you’d see homeless people.
They would be fed in front of the Rand building on a regular basis, and i’d guess their numbers to be around 100-150 living rough, many on the bluffs as far as overnight accommodations go.
Most every community has homeless now in LA, and keep in mind all it would take to create new legions of homeless is the bursting of the housing bubble, long overdue.
FILO rules would apply, and long-standing homeless had already figured out the best spots to eke a living, location, location, location!
Thanks for posting this. Great article. My snap response is what a bunch of sick MFer’s run this country, but I’m going to have to stew for a while and have a more coherent comment once I keep calm and carry on…
My snap response is that this must be what many people want because they keep voting for these MFs.
Ouch! You could be right. Although, I haven’t voted for either wing of the uniparty since 2008.
But yeah, I don’t see and end to this until there’s a homeless voting block (and even then the MSM will have us arguing over blue tarp or green tarp, and debating which corporate prison is better.)
if the free trading idiots running america do not think that this incident is going on unnoticed in countries that we are pummeling to take their commodities and labor, we are handing them brilliant talking points on why you do not want to be part of the western free trading world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4EcvQWqXkw
the poor lady is correct, the people running america are evil.
With 8 billion human lives in simultaneous being combined with the global portability of capital, none of our traditional market-based socio-economic systems are able to function to promote the well-being of the majority. Social mores formed in the 19th century, or even the 1970’s, are obsolete — but our political “leaders” remain mired in the “solutions” of 50 years ago that simply don’t reflect facts on the ground today.
The situation is quite hopeless. Mariupol and Gaza are the Cities of the Future.
In the first place, prisons may not be needed at all. Despite being called “correctional facilities,” prisons do not turn bad people into good people. A more modern approach should be to view criminals as a kind of sick person and provide them with care and treatment.
Thank you for this substantial piece.
Chris Hedges is heavily invested in the prison issue. He teaches literature there.
His blog has many texts touching the subject. Just search for the term “prison”.
E.g. See this interview from last year. Actually almost exactly – Dec. 15th, 2023!
The Chris Hedges Report with attorney Liz Komar on the decay of the American legal system, the criminalization of poverty and the crisis of mass incarceration.
40 min.
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-chris-hedges-report-with-liz-komar?utm_source=publication-search
p.s. a friend of ours, L.A. resident works in engineeering and manufacturing. The former owner of the company he has been working for decades used to supply Boeing. Then the company was taken over. Now they produce e.g. showers for prisons.
The angle for the fixed shower they povide has to be exactly followed. He spoke an hour about this issue on the phone. The reason: Hundreds of showers had been manufactured with the wrong angle. So the entire thing had to be redesigned and manufactured and produced again.
I find it appalling how even leftists in Germany constantly babble about China but never mention France e.g. (which has an anwful prison system I heard.) And never about the US prison industrial compelx.
Personally, I blame Hollywood. In Hollywood world the police are always our benefactors, they solve 90% of the crimes, and if they miss something, Perry Mason will ferret it out.
Back here on planet earth, in California, police solve 13.2% of crimes (in 2022). But while US population increased 42% between 1982 and 2017, police spending increased 187%! Failure is its own reward!
With 5% of the world’s population the US has 25% of its prisoners…or five times the world’s per-capita average incarceration rate. That’s seven times more than Canada and France, which actually have lower crime rates.
How do the Canadians and French manage? For one thing, the US has more than a half million medical bankruptcies annually. Canada and France don’t do that.
It’s actually cheaper (single-payer healthcare is half as expensive as US healthcare) and more humane to treat people well…but that might interfere with labor discipline…so the beatings will continue until morale improves.
This is yet another problem that is unique to the American society, or at least the only place that is out of control. When this happens, we just need to look at what other countries are doing and follow them. When we don’t follow them, we know this is a political problem created by intransigent ideologues.
The problems with mental illness, drugs and gun violence are in this category. When someone suggests practical and effective solutions that every other nation employs, the objections are always in the names of freedom, democracy and the constitution.
The first step will be setting up camps outside the cities in empty land, and maybe this is what Trump is talking about. These will remove the homeless from the inner cities, the blue hearts of the nation, and this removal will be tacitly approved by those blue hearts for the sake of business, clean sidewalks, and livability. There will be howls and clutching of pearls but in the end, and pretty soon, this will happen. This removes homeless people from the urban core, and too bad for those who work there. If at the same time illegal immigrants are deported, there will be a huge labor shortage for many essential low paying jobs, and of course many of these will then shift to prisons or the new camps.
We are, and always have been, a truly savage nation….
Superb piece, Conor (as usual!). Great detail. It strikes me that, given the extent of criminalization and incarceration of people for the “crime” of being unable to meet the usurious rents imposed by private equity, the true number of actual US homeless far exceeds 650,000: that number just represents the tip of the iceberg, those who haven’t been imprisoned yet. Once in prison, they work essentially for free, they can’t vote, and in many states won’t be able to even after release — so these policies are also deeply undemocratic.
The devil in me says that the Scrooges who advocate for and profit from such inhumane policies, and the politicians that serve them, don’t deserve a community, a government, or certainly the largesse of a central bank. Let them all be moved to an island in a hurricane belt and fight among themselves for resources.